Low sleep ramblings

**The next 21 days I’ll be posting 500 words a day as part of a creative writing challenge. You can join the fb group here. **

I am in a mood right now where I hate most things. Naturally this means that Ryan is walking on eggshells. I would like to be more evolved.

I live in constant fear that I’m going to walk into a public bathroom stall and it will be dirty. Having recently done a bunch of past timelines stuff, I’m slightly curious how this fear took root in some other lifetime, but not enough to really go there.

A friend was telling me recently about this acting coach who has a cult-like methodology and the following to match. She told me about the way that the woman would call out people who didn’t agree with her in front of the whole class. “You’re just resisting,” she’d say, and then the group would ostracize the person who disagreed. She told me and my blood boiled because I realized I knew that story, too.

One time I was part of a yoga cult. I say “one time” but actually it lasted for several years. My secular friends couldn’t even deal with being around me at the time. We’d be standing in conversation at a bar and I would literally break into tree pose, or sometimes, and I’m only admitting this because they’re still around to remind me—dancers pose. My long-term boyfriend said that we couldn’t relate anymore, so we broke up. All the while I was convinced that I was right and everyone else was just in denial. It wasn’t all bad though—I met two of my best friends through it, and also I was hella fit.

But that got me thinking that Enneagram Eights are the worst. My friend Jessica is also an eight, but I think she is lying because she’s a really lovely person. I’m pretty sure all cult leaders are eights. It’s part of their charm.

I’m falling asleep typing this so I’ll have to finish, I mean write something totally different, next time. 

A perfect Saturday

**The next 22 days I’ll be posting 500 words a day as part of a creative writing challenge. You can join the fb group here. **

Sometimes writing for 30 days means that there are a few good stories, some poorly-written stories and, in the case of what's below, stories that aren't even a story so much as a series of words in some sort of order.

Tonight we hosted a sound bath. If you don’t know what that is, it is not the thing where you hand your keys over when you walk in the door. What it is, is a thing in which you lay or sit around a listen to drone-y type music which lulls you into a deep meditative state. Except I was freezing and so I spent the better part of forty-five minutes obsessing over why I didn’t just ask people if they needed blankets, or say, the heat, before we started. Instead, I compulsively kept checking the room in near darkness to see if anyone had died from hypothermia. I’m a terrible host.  

Just before Ryan moved to LA, I shared a house in Beachwood Canyon with three roommates. Each were either musicians or artists or both and I think of my brief time there fondly. Casey was on tour for a good portion of my stay at Chateau Shaman, and it was mostly Brian, Sarah and me making coffee in the morning and dinner at night. Brian and Sarah are atypical vegans in the sense they don’t come right out and tell you, so I made a handful of meals that no one else touched before I caught on.

It isn’t that anything spectacular happened during my five months at the Chateau (save Sarah’s birthday party). But the days spent around three people living so unapologetically filled me with a constant sense of possibility and wonder. Despite my corporate gig, I too, felt bohemian. Of the almost ten years that I’ve lived in Los Angeles now, those were some of my favorite days.

A couple of weeks ago Brian reached out to say he and his girlfriend wanted to throw us a sound bath as a housewarming gift. Brian is an incredibly talented musician, and also very generous, so, yes. I invited the other roommates to our house, plus some older and newer friends. I ordered too many potato tacos, and Brian and Angie soundchecked.

For the next forty-five minutes, I lay back against a giant floor pillow, amongst friends strewn about our living room, eyes closed, deep in meditation. After the ambient tranquilizer several of us stayed to talk about our experience. And while I’m no longer living in the Chateau, I felt like a legit bohemian all over again.